A Whole Century Ahead of His Time

On January 7, 1943, in a hotel room in New York, Tesla died at the age of 86. Very soon after the last breath of one of the greatest scientists of our century, an entire chain of events was set in motion. It turned out that there was enormous interest in Tesla’s surviving manuscripts. To our good fortune, and thanks to the extraordinary skill of Tesla’s nephew Sava Kosanović, almost all of his manuscripts were transferred to Yugoslavia.

It seemed that everything would be all right. The materials, packed in over 30 crates, were located in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, accessible to scientists so that from this wealth of material they could draw inspiration or develop ideas which Tesla himself did not have the opportunity to complete. Many of his ideas have been realized, but it appears that Tesla’s time is only now arriving.

In the meantime, Tesla’s unfinished work has become the subject of commercialization and everyday speculation, particularly in the American “business” underworld. The reason that superficial observers are only now discovering Tesla lies in the needs of scientific and technological development, for which Tesla’s concepts — superfluous or unrealizable at the time — are becoming extraordinarily relevant.

Thanks to the courtesy of the staff of the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, especially Prof. Dr. Veljko Korać and Dr. Aleksandar Marinić, the former and current directors of the Museum, we have the opportunity to acquaint you with these achievements of Tesla’s.

Many of them are now appearing before the wider public for the first time. We hope that in this way we will at least partially dispel the misconceptions about Tesla’s work and support the growing number of scientists who believe that Tesla’s postulates are realizable today and that they offer the opportunity to open a new page in the development of science and technology.

Even if we were to leave aside Tesla’s visionary and inspirational work, researchers would not be left empty-handed.

Namely, Tesla’s contradictory personality, his logical reasoning, and even the purity with which he conducted his scientific proofs, could themselves be a special subject of research from which, undoubtedly, results of the broadest interest would emerge for sciences such as logic, psychology or even physiology.